How to Bypass Virgin Mobile's Robotic "Helper"

Quoted verbatim from an email to their customer service:

Since you were unable to reach an advisor earlier, to help you with this I have included the instruction as to how to reach an advisor through Alex [the bot]. Once you call us at 1-888-322-1122 (or *vm on your virgin mobile phone):

1. Press 1 to choose English
2. Press 6 to ask a question
3. Press 7 to select troubleshoot
4. Press 1 and then Key in your Phone Number
5. Press 2 and you should reach a live advisor.

Note that the bot does not mention the numerical options (poor voice recognition is the way of the future!), and if you have a problem with something other than making calls, you basically have to lie about it if you want to talk to a human (say "no" to "do you have problems making calls?" and the robot will spit out a canned answer with no option to continue if that's in fact totally unrelated to your problem).

Hey, Virgin Mobile, if your email tech support has a form letter about how to circumvent the front-end for your phone tech support, you just might be doing something wrong!

(Prior to my angry email, I tried the advice of gethuman, but their instructions appear to be out of date in this instance. Also, I wrote this post while on hold.)

Books Unread Meme

From Yonmei:

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicise the ones you started but didn't finish:

( The List )